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Comment by jakubp | Hacker News Reader

It should be the basic assumption that other vertebrates do feel pain unless proven otherwise. Same with thoughts, consciousness, etc.

It's similar to frequently repeated claims that only humans are conscious, but dogs, cats, cows, horses, etc. (let alone non-mammals) are not. That only humans have true and advanced emotions, thoughts, imagination, planning, abstraction, etc. I think apes and monkeys have convinced some already that it's not the case, but it really doesn't take much more than observing a dog over a few weeks to see how incredibly smart, emotionally subtle, plan-based, communication-based (between species!) etc. they are.

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I totally agree, yet the established and 'informed' take on this is to disregard any such observations of emotion and other complex behavior in animals as anthropomorphism.

> In science, the use of anthropomorphic language that suggests animals have intentions and emotions has traditionally been deprecated as indicating a lack of objectivity. Biologists have been warned to avoid assumptions that animals share any of the same mental, social, and emotional capacities of humans, and to rely instead on strictly observable evidence. In 1927 Ivan Pavlov wrote that animals should be considered "without any need to resort to fantastic speculations as to the existence of any possible subjective states". More recently, The Oxford companion to animal behaviour (1987) advised that "one is well advised to study the behaviour rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism#In_science

After years of casually observing stray cats, for example, I would nearly bet my life that they experience complex emotions like love, embarrassment, and depression, but I know better than to draw that conclusion around my biologist and zookeeper friends. While the scientific motivation makes sense somewhat, I think it's pretty clearly a feel-good default notion that allows us humans to keep eating, experimenting on, and otherwise subjugating animals for our own purposes (not that I'm not guilty of some of these).

out of curiosity, why would the default presumption be that other vertebrates feel pain, have thoughts, are conscious, while the default presumption in most other sciences is that something is not true unless evidence is provided positively.

You can't prove positively that other humans feel pain. The best you can do is say that they look, when they are in the situations in which you would feel pain, similar to the way you look when you feel pain.

The less other people or things look like themselves, the more they are judged not to feel pain or any sort of inner state in the same way. There's never any evidence preceding the judgment; what precedes the judgment is a material dependence on that person or animal being treated in a way that would cause us pain, and the judgment is a result of demanding evidence for that pain that we wouldn't demand to prove that our neighbor felt pain.

Other things that at some time according to the scientific consensus didn't feel pain? Babies and black people.

Because of the moral implications otherwise, and because the evidence is "humans feel pain, animals are very similar to humans, therefore it's overwhelmingly probable that they feel pain too". It's not as if we're wondering if rocks feel pain.

ok, but how similar exactly? Insects are animals...do insects feel pain?

You should try actually reading the article, which gives several different examples of interesting behavioral experiments to infer the conscious decision of certain fish to avoid painful experiences (without requiring the fish to tell us on a scale of 1 to 10 'how much it hurts' in fishspeak).

The article stimulated the fish in ways that humans feel pain and then observed the behavior of the fish. All that tells us is that the fish merely prefer avoiding those stimuli.

If you want to continue that argument along, head down Solipsism. You are the only conscious being. Everyone else is just performing actions but they arent truly conscious. They say they feel pain, they avoid it. But they could just be like the fish. This is the story of YOU. You are the main char. The rest? They are automotons, cause and effect. You only know that you feel. Everyone else is merely an external cue..deceiving you in some respect...but really, the fact is, you cant tell. Neither can we. Thats the game of brains in a box. Life...

That's a reasonable assumption, until we can prove they don't.

So where and how can you draw the line. Ameobas? Sponges? The first brains (which appears in worms 500 million years ago)?

Yes, if you can avoid causing pain to all of those, do. Is that such a problem?

This line of argument isn't going anywhere useful, no matter how many times you repeat it.

> out of curiosity, why would the default presumption be that other vertebrates feel pain, have thoughts, are conscious, while the default presumption in most other sciences is that something is not true unless evidence is provided positively.

Your question is foiled by semantics. The truth is the truth, regardless of phrasing of the hypothesis.

For example, if my hypothesis is that fish do feel pain, I pre-establish experiment criteria, which if witnessed during testing would support the conclusion that the hypothesis is true; fish do feel pain. Similarly, if I start with the hypothesis that fish do not feel pain, establish my criteria and witness the empirical results passing said criteria, then the results support that the hypothesis is true (fish do not feel pain).

So, it doesn't matter how the hypothesis is phrased, what matters is the test criteria and the empirical results against that criteria. You can arrive at the same conclusion either way.

If you want to contest something, contest the criteria the researcher uses to base their conclusion. However, it gets more difficult to refute results when multiple experiments using a variety of different techniques & criteria all tend to point to the same truth.

You aren't trying to "prove" a hypothesis, you are trying to prescribe to others how they should live their lives by telling them the assumptions they should hold. Without any kind of proof for that.

First, I didn't say anything about 'proving a hypothesis'. Instead, I described testing a hypothesis.

State a hypothesis, test, evaluate the results and draw a conclusion.

What you do with the results of the conclusions is up to you. I personally enjoy fishing, on the other hand, reading this article will give me pause WRT fishing as a sport in the future.

I do think the article has a slant and agenda, but it's an article about i terpreting/applying the results, not a scientific paper. The issue I have with the question presented is that it supposes that the experiments were conducted with some sort of bias. My point is that a properly designed experiment will test a hypothesis and yield evidence that points to some discernable truth. There is nothing different going on here that is any different from other experiments.

I'm not sure where this presumption is used, but I much prefer the general idea of falsifiability (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability), where you make a hypothesis and then try to disprove it. If you can't disprove it, then maybe the hypothesis is true. However, in this particular case you can make either hypothesis: other animals do feel pain (etc.) or other animals do not feel pain, so I don't think either approach moves you forward on its own.

Just like humans are generally all alike (with few exceptions, such as size, food preferences or favorite pop song - we really are extremely similar to one another in almost every aspect of our life), so are animals much more like humans than many people think, and for me the default hypothesis is that they are indeed similar.

Then we try to disprove it. How can I prove that animals do not feel pain? Well I can try a few things: - Maybe they don't run from harm? - Maybe they don't fight when attacked? - Maybe they don't dodge hits? - Maybe they don't care about predators? - Maybe they don't have nervous system at all which we believe to be the basis for pain? (also based on an observation of people whose damaged nervous system made them not feel pain)

Turns out, all those things are broadly true about animals, so it's hard to prove they don't feel pain. So maybe they do?

If you try with thoughts, consciousness, abstraction, planning, communication, emotion, detecting emotion of others of the same species or other species, etc. you will quickly find that: - for some animals it seems quite certain they do all that - for some it's unclear how much they can do - for some it's almost certain they don't do any of that not just because they don't have the type of brain area which in humans is responsible for this, but also because there is nothing in their behavior, senses etc. that even resembles that kind of function.

I don't need to prove that my dog feels pain. Assuming he doesn't, why does he bark, bite, squeal etc. when something hurts it?

> "Assuming he doesn't, why does he bark, bite, squeal etc. when something hurts it?"

Because that is an evolutionary successful thing to do. The barking and squealing communicates to other dogs that there is danger, and the biting is simple self-preservation.

Although there are numerous definitions of pain, almost all involve two key components. First, nociception is required. Second is some emotional factor.

I don't care whether an animal thinks about the pain or emotes about it. You wouldn't put pedo porn on a disk because its bad karma. Just the fact that it exists is grotesque. So why put torture into the mind of a biological disk in the form of doge? The universe gives us so much.. greed is where heinous acts come from. Airing on the side of harmony doesn't cause later strife. Why take chances like cheap profiteers?

And how is this different than when I scream out after stepping on a thorn?

At the time of Huxley and Darwin, your question would mostly get the response that the presumption is wrong. These days we know that the foundational biochemistry out of which these qualia arise is the same give or take a few pathways and therefore tend to doubt that humans are especial in these characteristics.

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